The \x85 appears to be the problem. We have a PDF generator that seems to like putting these types of characters in the names of the files it generates.

Good news Craig!

When I originally saw your bug report, I thought it would not be possible to fix this problem until Python 3 comes out this fall. However, due to some very recent, other work to get rdiff-backup working natively on Windows, the fix for your bug became trivial. I tested the fix using a file with the \x85 character (ellipses on Mac OS X).

Rdiff-backup can now support Unicode filenames, at least for basic back-up and restore. I have not heavily tested extended attributes, ACLs, etc. Also, I have also only tested this on the Mac OS X HFS+ filesystem.

The bug fix is in CVS. If you wish to test it, simply download the new rpath.py file from CVS: